


Belief

by Bishopsbird



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Fans, Gen, Horror, Insanity, Kidnapping, Medical Procedures, Mind Games, Obsession, Post Reichenbach, Serious Injuries, Spoilers for Stephen King's Misery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:30:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bishopsbird/pseuds/Bishopsbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“How did you know my name?” Sherlock asks.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>At this her smile becomes even wider, revealing small, slightly yellowish teeth in a grin that is grotesque in its greedy pleasure.</i></p><p>  <i>“Of course I know your name you silly man,” she says. “I’m your number one fan.”</i></p><p>There are three types of fans. Catch me before I kill again. Type A. Your bedroom’s just a taxi ride away. Type B. </p><p>Annie Wilkes is Type C.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Belief

Umber whunnnn yerrnnn umber whummm. These sounds: even in the darkness.

**

Sherlock wakes up the first time and sees nothing but black. He wonders if he’s gone blind. He thinks his eyes are open, but he can’t be sure and this worries him. His whole body is heavy, and he can’t make anything move, not even his eyelids, so maybe he’s not blind, just paralyzed?  

Which is worse, being blind or being paralyzed? He should have an opinion, but he can’t tell, his mind as sluggish and unresponsive as his body.

The last thing he remembers is the windshield of his father’s Bentley in pieces around him, his vision filmed with red, blood (his blood) everywhere and hands grabbing for him, and his brother’s voice next to his ear but sounding as through it  was coming from somewhere underground.

 _Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock_ —screaming, Sherlock would have said, but Mycroft doesn’t scream. Crying, too (only Mycroft doesn’t cry) and Mycroft saying something about how he just lost Father and he can’t lose Sherlock too, which doesn’t make sense at first to Sherlock but he remembers—

The diagnosis. Mummy being hopeful, Father being realistic. The hospital. Sherlock at Father’s bedside and the discussion (leaving university, using, when are you going to get your degree when are you going to make something out of yourself Sherlock you are 21 for god’s shake).

Father’s funeral, the reading of the will: _And to Sherlock, my car._ A bequest like an incomplete joke, the punch line—and nothing else because he’d just put it up his noise—left unspoken.

So Father died thinking he was a worthless deadbeat drop-out junkie. So fine. So why shouldn’t Sherlock skip the ghastly meal they’re serving up at the estate after the funeral to do a couple of lines, and then take Father’s car for a joy ride? Let Father be right, Sherlock had thought as he zipped along the narrow country road, cutting corners and turns with abandon, feeling as though he was floating somewhere up above from his body, looking down on himself in the car until—

The tree suddenly in front of him, Sherlock trying to turn the car and then the blood and the windshield, and Mycroft (he should have known Mycroft had been following him, big brother always watching) and someone screaming. His body weightless, broken.  

Sherlock's vision is still shrouded in darkness. _Mycroft_ , he tries to say, but his lips won’t move.

And now the hospital, Sherlock guesses, and he tries to open his month to ask but still nothing will move, his brain sending directions that his body refuses to follow.

Sherlock feels fingers at his lips, trying to part them.  The fingers are holding something small and rounded—a pill, Sherlock guesses, because what else could it be?

 _Mycroft_ , he tries again, but his mouth still won’t move, and besides, he’s wrong, because those aren’t Mycroft’s fingers. Mycroft’s fingers are short and stubby and blunt like stout candles, his littlest finger still a bit crooked from when he broke it sledding when he was nine. No, these are a woman’s fingers, smaller and more delicate. But if not Mycroft, then who is it?

Father’s quavering voice banishing him from the hospital, that was just last month, right? Or last year? Last decade? Father feels far away and vanished, like Sherlock’s been in a coma for years, lost and abandoned, forgotten.

The fingers are pushing at his lips again, and Sherlock should be able to learn something about the woman from feeling them against his lips, her age, profession, personality, anything—

But his mind is clouded and fuzzy, and refuses to grant him deductions.

The fingers leave his month.

Someone is talking— _If you can’t be good, Mr. Man, then we’ll have to do it the other way_ —and Sherlock knows the words should mean something, but they are the audial equivalent of paragraphs written in a foreign language. Noises he can’t decipher, meaningless, although some part of him keeps telling him that he should be able to understand.

Then Sherlock feels a sharp prick in his arm, quick jab of pain before his body is flooded with blessed relief, golden muteness, and he’s falling, fading, a blur of images flashing in a confused jumble in his memory—snow rushing up to meet him, tyres skidding on ice, and then: nothing.

**

The next time Sherlock wakes up, everything hurts, pain a living creature curled up inside of him. His head feels as though it’s been stuffed with cotton. His brain is slow, muffled, thoughts oozing out like molasses instead of rushing one on top of another quicksilver swift like he’s used to.

He still sees nothing but blackness, but Sherlock doesn’t try to open his eyes yet. Blind or paralyzed or neither? Both?

Sherlock isn’t sure that he wants to know.

Sherlock can hear humming, and the sounds of small objects being picked up and rearranged (medical equipment? Knickknacks? He can’t tell). There’s an alien presence here with Sherlock—wherever “here” is—and as Sherlock listens he recognizes the song as _Danny Boy_ , hummed just enough off key to set Sherlock’s nerves on edge.

Whoever is with him, it’s not Mycroft.

Of course not, because now Sherlock remembers: He’s not 21, and Father didn’t die last week. The Bentley’s been scrap metal for over a decade and Father’s been in the ground for longer. Sherlock’s clean, has been for years.

But the more things change—well, clearly they don’t change that much, because Sherlock still can’t stop running.

This time it’s running to, instead of running away, because ever since he went into hiding after the Fall he’s gone full out, going to the far corners of the earth to run down everyone with whom Moriarty’s ever associated, with barely a pause for sleep or eating or anything else.

Which now that Sherlock thinks of it, probably wasn’t such a good idea. Two years after he faked his death and abandoned John, London, everything, his relentless searching lead him to a little windy country road in the North at midnight, chasing after someone named Moran on less than two hours sleep in the last fifty.

It was middle of February and his mobile was predicting a blizzard. Sherlock remembers snowflakes dotting his windshield, first just a few sprinkles here and there, and then more than his wipers could remove. He remembers wishing he had snow tryes and trying to check the weather on his mobile with one hand while he steered with the other. He remembers skidding and his vision filling up with white and then—

Blank—a white haze (snow, maybe?) and the next thing he remembers is here.

The humming’s stopped. Sherlock hears footsteps, the presence in the room coming closer to him, and then feels fingers pressing at his month.

The sensation of fingers trying to part his lips is faintly familiar (this has occurred before, maybe?) and at this vague memory Sherlock’s eyes open and his sight is flooded with light even as the fingers move swiftly away from his lips.

So, not blind then.

Sherlock peers around the room, his mind registering the details slower than it ought to, but still thinking, evaluating, as he tries to bring the data together into some type of conclusion.  

He is in a small room, the walls painted a shade that was once a cheerful yellow but now has faded to an apathetic cream. The walls are bare except for a calendar with a photograph of deer in the forest—one of those cheap nature calendars charities send you in the post at Christmas for donating a couple of pounds.

There are no windows, pictures, posters—nothing else to tell him where he is. Sherlock tries to sit up to see more but his limbs still won’t obey him. He manages to shift a bit—he’s lying in what must be a bed, and he can feel a blanket covering him—before he is met with resistance, a firm hand pressing him back down.

A face swims his vision, the alien presence in the room bending over him.

It’s a woman, as he surmised. Middle aged but not old (early forties maybe?) with faint lines on her forehead and a warm if slightly vacant gaze.  A doctor, Sherlock guess. Or a nurse? Perhaps he’s in some type of private hospital, only if that were so there should be more machines around him. Likely more people in the room with him too, or at least the sense of general business to the place instead of the quiet stillness that pervades his surroundings.

Something’s wrong.

Sherlock should figured out some idea of where he is by now, but forcing his mind to conjure up deductions is like trying to see through a fog. Like his body, his mind simply will not respond to his directions.

As the woman bends further down over him, her hair comes into view, and Sherlock’s sense of unease grows. Her hair is muddy brown, shoulder length, and messy. She dyed it a darker brown about three months ago judging by her roots, and her gray is coming in at the top, the wiry silver strands escaping from where she’s parted her hair at the center.

The grey’s not much, on its own—plenty of women don’t dye their hair—but coupled with the grown out dye job, it speaks of prior attention to her appearance that is currently neglected and forgotten. It speaks of depression, of disappointment, of things left undone and abandoned.

Sherlock tries to examine her more closely, tells himself to read her personality from the rest of her features. He has enough data—by now he should know everything about this woman but her name. But the pain flares through his body, sharp spike of agony and he can’t reason through the mist that’s clouding his thoughts.

Yes, something is very wrong.

Sherlock blinks. Good—his eyelids are moving better at least. He tries to speak, and at first all comes out is a rasp. He pauses for breath, tries again, and this time manages to ask, “Where am I?”

The woman peers at him for a long moment. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she says finally. Accent? Born in London, lived in Manchester for years and moved north a couple of years ago. Not enough—Sherlock needs more data.

“You’re going to be just fine” she adds, and then her face vanishes.  She’s moved to the foot of the bed, and Sherlock feels her straightening the sheets that cover his body, her movements businesslike, brisk. He’d have to see her hands to be sure, but something about her demeanor has him guessing nurse.

“How long?” Sherlock asks her, trying another question since she didn’t seem to like the location inquiry.

“You've been asleep for two days.” Sheets apparently adjusted to her satisfaction, her face appears once more in his vision as she moves back to the head of the bed. The woman smiles, the grin transforming her bland features into a mask of childlike glee. “You’re lucky I came by when I did, you know. Your car had plowed right into a snow drift. An hour or so more, and you would have been buried under the blizzard.”

Sherlock tries to respond, but his throat seizes up, and all he manages is, “Lucky.”

This word seems to please her. She flashes that childlike grin at him again. “Yes, very lucky.”

“Where?” Sherlock tries again, her voice a croak.

She leans down closer to him, and her hair falls into Sherlock’s face, her muddy brown and grey strands brushing against his forehead. “Shush,” she tells, him, “don’t tire yourself, Sherlock.”

She peers at him again, a calculating look in her eyes that Sherlock doesn’t like, before moving away to rummage in something that Sherlock can’t see beside his bed.

Did Sherlock tell her his name? He doesn’t think so, but his head is so frustratingly muddy. He might have done. She said she found him in his car, though. So perhaps she looked through his wallet, found his cards, his identification, his mobile. Learned his name from that maybe? But no—all his identification and cards are in the names of his alias. If she was going from his wallet, she should have called him Sigerson. 

Her face comes back into view, her mouth still twisted up into a smile.

“How did you know my name?” Sherlock asks.

At this question her smile becomes even wider, revealing her small, slightly yellowish teeth in a grin that is grotesque in its greedy pleasure.

Sherlock suddenly wishes his throat had seized up on him again. He should have played his cards close to the vest, shouldn’t have asked her that question.

“Of course I know your name you silly man,” she says. “I’m your number one fan.”

She moves away from him again, shifts the sheet, and Sherlock feels something press against his arm.

“What—” he starts to say.

The sharpness presses into him—a needle, he realizes—a sharp point of pain that flares out into a soft haze suffusing his limbs. He tries to say something else, but his mouth won’t work.

Her face bobs into view again, doubling now as his vision blurs. Two images of that dreadful smile flout in front of him. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she says.

Sherlock tries to turn his head, wants to escape from her eyes, her grin, the sweaty nearness of her body, but he can’t move, and the last thing he hears before he fades back into the blackness is that _he has nothing to worry about, that Annie is here to take care of him and he’s gonna be just fine_. 

**Author's Note:**

> WIP
> 
> Written for [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/21231.html?thread=123880175#t123880175) at the kink meme.


End file.
